


an overflowing cup of coffee (at eleven in the night)

by lvckyphan



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Violence, Dan Howell/Phil Lester Comfort, Depressed Dan Howell, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Phan AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-11
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-02-13 14:49:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12986373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lvckyphan/pseuds/lvckyphan
Summary: “And Phil tries with crossed fingers only to keep both of their heads above the water because doing anything else is far too much work and he doesn’t wish for Dan to say thank you because he doesn’t wish for gratitude given fifty times over.He doesn’t wish for the excuse that the first forty-nine times just didn’t feel right.”





	an overflowing cup of coffee (at eleven in the night)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this entire thing today, in pretty much one sitting. I don’t know exactly how it reads from beginning to end but I think it’s good enough to post. If you suffer from OCD or are sensitive to generally heavy themes, I advise you not to read. This is probably just really triggering. However, if you choose to proceed, I hope you enjoy and do find it to be an accurate representation of said disorder. I’m not here to teach anything—and I’m not even in any professional place to try and attempt that—but I feel like, to some extent, that I needed to write this to get me out of my recent creative slump. I guess it is a very personal one, but again, it’s fanfic so it feels more comfortable and plot-heavy. I still don’t intend for that to make this any less serious, though. The message still stands.
> 
> Thanks for reading.

****

• • •

_He_ was always apologising for the things he had no control over.

When the television set would cast awful images on the living-room wall and he’d sit there twiddling his thumbs, Phil would wait for the careful utterance of guilt to settle between the syllables of news coverage. He’d pull it between his teeth and grind it down to dusty remnants until it tasted like responsibility and the dregs of society and Dan would say it again, and again for a perfect three and Phil would see his index tap against the arm of the sofa.

_My fault, my fault, my fault._

“Why are you sorry?”

“I just am.”

“You don’t have to be,” Phil would tell him. “You don’t have to be sorry. What have you done wrong?”

“I do have to be sorry. It’s not about doing something wrong.”

And Phil wouldn’t understand, but he wouldn’t question further. Dan knew he didn’t understand, in the same way Dan knew he tried to and that was all that mattered. Sometimes he’d tell Phil that he felt like somebody had tied a plastic bag around his ankle and piled it high with rocks when his right foot would brush the chair leg but his left couldn’t quite reach and Phil would smile lopsidedly (with just one side of his mouth) and press, “It makes you feel heavy?”

And Dan supposed it did.

Dan supposed it _really_ did.

He supposed ‘heavy’ was a term with a significant degree of accuracy, a significant degree of honesty and a word he’d swallow like bile in the back of his throat when his phone would weigh down his left pocket more than his keys would his right. It was the kind-of heavy that would come as a child, he thought, when clambering out of the swimming pool and dragging trails of water with bare feet. Like he was trying to get clean and wash the filth from his skin but all he’d feel is the load of a failed fucking attempt and a cycle of effort like somebody had stuffed the word ‘struggle’ into a washing machine and set it on high.

And he was just sat there waiting for the water to rinse it clean.

For the pattern to ring him dry.

“You don’t have to do that, Dan.”

Often, Phil sleeps on the right side with his shoulder against the mattress. And Dan sleeps on the left even though he never gets much sleep, for his legs are too restless and his fingers are too far apart and he leaves his engagement ring on the dresser when the gold pushes up too tight around his knuckle. Phil asks him the first time it happens why the ring is there on the wood with a face that makes Dan wish he’d just his cut his finger off and a voice that communicates with every intention of subtlety how much more he can fucking take.

“I took it off,” Dan says. “I took it off last night.”

And the final syllable will graze the roof of his mouth like nails on a chalkboard and he’ll repeat it until it doesn’t feel like an unbuckled seatbelt or like everyone in Australia has emigrated to America.

— _ight, ight, ight._

“You don’t have to do that.”

Phil puts the ring on the kitchen surface and it settles in a perfect circle.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine, Dan.”

“It’s not. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I’m still sorry,” he whispers. London is forecasted snow and the sky is a blur of white, white, white. _One, two, three_. “I had to take it off. I had to.”

“I know, I get it,” Phil says. He’s put the kettle on and the sound is pouring through into the silence. “You can’t help it. Do you want a drink?”

And they’ve both grown so accustomed to pretending that it doesn’t fucking matter Dan wouldn’t be able to burn one side of his body without burning the other because it just wouldn’t fucking feel right. It just wouldn’t fucking feel right to bruise and bleed if he couldn’t bruise and bleed all over and the situation, realistically, has less to do with symmetry and more to do with obsession, and he supposes they’ll just dismiss it as perfectionism until the day he makes himself so tragically imperfect in the name of a single flaw. But even then, it won’t be enough. Because nothing ever is and nothing ever will be and nothing ever has been, even though once he did believe it was.

Even though once he was ignorant.

_Four, five, six._

It isn’t optimism, it’s ignorance. It isn’t pessimism, it’s truth. It’s reality and it’s honesty and it’s seeing the world for what it is with eyes wide fucking open and lips stitched fucking shut, for sometimes it’s worse to say something than it is to say nothing at all. Sometimes ‘nothing’ is all that’s required because it’s all one has to offer and Dan knows the insides of ‘nothing’ like it’s that slash he got from a tree branch one time and his blood gushed out in a surge of red and horror.

_I’m not, I’m not, I’m not._

He’s not fucking selfish.

He doesn’t mean to be fucking selfish.

_Seven, eight, nine._

Phil asks him one afternoon to help with the groceries and he carries one bag in each hand containing a different amount of items and the tins are heavier than the packets but he works his own way through it. He shuts the front door and then opens it and then shuts it again and he turns away to head for the kitchen, but returns after three seconds to reopen it because maybe Phil will slip on ice on the driveway and break a bone if he doesn’t.

Maybe Phil will die in his sleep and he’ll have to fight the urge to blame himself because he could never fucking sleep with one eye open if the other is closed. He could never fucking feel such imbalance that his entire body is burning and his brain is eating up his skull because anxiety is stirring like a sickness bug in the pit of his stomach.

Phil tries to walk through the door with bags in his hands and snow on his coat just as Dan goes to shut it again. He sticks his foot in the way and manages, “Hey, what are you doing? I’m right here,” through chattering teeth.

His lips are cracked and pale and his fingers are red raw.

_Ten, eleven, twelve._

“Phil, please,” Dan says. He’s dropped his own bags on the floor and the tins have toppled out. “Please, move.”

“Dan, I need to get in. It’s cold, come on, these are the last bags.”

“Phil, I—Phil, please. Phil, please. Phil, pl—”

“Baby, I need to get past.”

And Dan is eighteen and terrified and can’t stop saying Phil’s name, not because he’s fucking in love with him but because the number fifty is just the number to do. Just because repetition is not about being perfect but about being just right and Phil’s twenty-two and angry that once isn’t enough. He’s twenty-two and angry that he doesn’t think he’ll ever get it, that even though the earth has always spun the same way, Dan swears to whatever God he believes in that it span a different two minutes ago. That it felt like it did, that it all just felt so wrong, and Phil’s here now still not getting it but still trying to help Dan fight it as he kicks the door back against the hinges and forces his way in.

“No—” Dan reaches to fist Phil’s jacket and grapples to shove him back out. “Get out, Phil, get out—”

_Get out, get out, get out._

Dan used to say he didn’t like to breathe when the lights went out and the night fell heavy. He used to hold his breath and count the seconds that skipped by and drum each foot against each wooden panel in time to the sequence of thoughts. He’d pace the floor and clench his fists so that he wouldn't start searching for the light switch and wake Phil up as they flickered ( _on, off, on, off_ ) but would always end up smashing his fist against the wall anyway. Like he was so desperate that he didn’t care exactly where he hit, or exactly at what speed and exactly at what strength and when he’d made one fucking dent, he had to make two more.

_Get out, get out, get out._

It’s the sound of knuckles against the wall that wakes Phil and he can’t see Dan through the darkness but at this point, he’s twenty-five and he fucking knows what’s happening even before his own feet hit the floor.

“Dan? Dan, what are you doing?”

_Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen._

“I need the light on,” he says. “I need the light on, I need the _fucking_ light on.”

But what he means is that he needs the light on just as much as he needs it off, and he needs some kind-of perfect balance of light and black, of hot and cold and good and bad and at twenty-five, Phil knows not to stop the panic but instead to calm it down and so he threads the word ‘okay’ into the night like a needle up a broken arm, stitching what can be mended onto something that can’t be. Sewing back the torn strings, fixing and repairing because maybe Phil Lester was never so crazy for believing he could fix something that preached it never could be.

Maybe we all like to believe that we’re good enough for somebody who doesn’t need somebody to be good enough for them, rather just to be good enough for themselves. And to know the places they stumble, to know where the chaos ends and the calm begins and to know that the moments in which nothing will ever be alright again often just feel the same as the moments in which you swear to God, you’ve never been fucking happier.

“Dan, it’s okay,” Phil’s searching for him through the darkness, tired and groggy and taking him against his chest. “It’s okay, it’s okay—Dan, stop it, it’s okay. You don’t need the light on. It’s okay.”

“I need it on—”

“Why do you need it on?” Phil hooks a hand around the back of his neck and puts his nose to his cheek. The lights are still off. The world is a terrible place. _Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen_. “What’s happening? What’s gonna happen? Why do you need it on?”

Dan’s shaking in Phil’s arms.

He’ll never admit to be frightened and he’ll never admit to being ashamed but in the weak sunrise of the early hours, he doesn’t have to admit a thing. He doesn’t have to admit that he thinks the cancer will eat his mother up if he doesn’t flick that light switch and he doesn’t have to admit that he knows he’s insane for thinking it, but he can’t take the fucking risk anyway. Because what kind-of person would take the fucking risk anyway?

He says this to Phil again when he shuts the front door and opens it for the tenth time. And Phil says, “There’s no link, Dan. There’s no link between shutting the door and me ending up on my ass out on the driveway. No link.”

And Dan tells him he knows that.

And Phil tells him he doesn’t know how to win.

And Dan tells him he doesn’t have to because it isn’t about winning.

And Phil tells him he wishes he knew what it was about.

“I just n-need to switch it on, I just do,” Dan’s crying in the middle of the bedroom. No walls, no flat surfaces, no bumps or bangs or flaws in the system. He’s twenty-one and Phil’s twenty-five and they’re standing there trying to convince themselves they have more of an idea than the other does about what’s happening.

Phil holds him and mutters, “I know,” in the same tone he’d mutter, “I’m sorry,” but all Dan hears is, “I’d do anything to make this go away.”

_I’d do anything to make this go away._

He didn’t agree to a life riddled with mental illness when he agreed to a life riddled with Dan and everything he was because, once, there was a time when everything he was wasn’t a disease. And once there was a time when the light switches didn’t flicker like a man wavering somewhere between life and death and when the front door snapping back in the harsh breeze didn’t result in a near panic attack and a frantic tug on the handle. Dan didn’t always used to be so shit at knowing what direction he had to travel to get what he wants in life and he didn’t always wake up with a phrase stuck to the insides of his skull like he’d fucking see it if his eyes rolled back in his head. And so maybe when he thinks about popping so many pills— _probably fifty, probably fifty, probably fifty_ —he thinks about it with the excuse of cleansing his mind of the phrase, for seeing it could be getting rid for all he fucking knows.

For right now is the first time in his life he has a credible excuse to down prescriptions not written for him.

And the first time he’d rather die than put up a fight.

And the first time it means nothing when Phil tells him, “I’d do anything to make this go away.”

_Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one._

“I just want the l-light on, Phil,” he whimpers. He thinks about the darkness and his mother dying of cancer. “P-Please, put it on. My mom, she—Please.”

And Phil doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t question further. He leaves Dan as a mess of damp clothes and cold limbs on the bedroom floor to switch on the light and let coherency flood the room for the half a second that passes before Dan sobs, “Off, no. Off.”

Twenty-one and twenty-five.

Dan doesn’t think about liquor when he can’t sleep yet. Phil doesn’t think about ending it when he can’t do anything to help yet. And neither of them know yet how to tackle tomorrow for they can’t even tackle today, and there’ll come a time when they won’t even able to tackle yesterday because yesterday was the worst it’s ever been and they’re not ready to leave it behind. The room spills back into darkness and then right back into light as Dan utters fragile commands like he did that time they slept together at eighteen and twenty-two in Phil’s shitty single bed and their heads were just as good as easy and silent and never knowing the meaning of trouble.

Phil plays with the light switch, not knowing if he’s helping or making it worse.

There’s exhaustion setting in his bones and he realises he doesn't give a fuck.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.”

“I woke you up again. I’m sorry.”

“Dan, it’s okay.”

“It’s _not_ okay,” Dan fights it from the kitchen doorway, as Phil puts the milk back in the refrigerator door. “This . . . This isn’t okay. I don’t know what’s happening. This isn’t okay.”

“What do you mean?” Phil turns, stirring a spoon in a mug. He’s got eyes that say he’s not ready to believe Dan is admitting there’s a problem.

“You know what I mean.”

“Tell me anyway,” Phil pauses and slows the motion of his hand. “Talk to me.”

_Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four._

Some days the world would work only for them and whilst everything else crumbled, all Phil could think about was what Dan was thinking about when he drummed his fingers in synchronisation to _something_ against the tabletop. Whilst houses burned to nothing and children starved to death, Dan Howell would check the locks on the windows and the gas on the stove because he didn’t want to be responsible for anything that would come to happen. He didn’t want to be responsible for that mistake somebody else made that one time, but he was always responsible anyway.

He makes Phil’s coffee without milk one day. He doesn’t know why he does.

“It’s fine,” Phil says. “I don’t mind it without. Black coffee is kinda good, I used to drink it when I was younger. Do you want to try some?”

Dan is sat beside him on the couch and he manages to shake his head without collapsing into a fit of tears. He’s dragged his teeth down over his lip and he’s digging so hard into the flesh that there’ll be blood all over his mouth in a matter of moments, but he can’t feel a thing.

He can’t feel a thing.

He’s not a fucking fuck-up.

He doesn’t mean to be a fucking fuck-up.

“Dan?” Phil presses.

Coffee and milk. It’s coffee and milk, just coffee and milk. Milk after coffee, coffee before milk. It’s a sequence, a pattern, a cycle that goes round and repeats itself like a poem with the _same_ goddamn phrase every other line.

_I’d do anything to make this go away._

“Dan, it’s fine,” Phil’s worried now, Dan hears it in his voice, and he doesn't fucking want him to worry but he can’t fucking look at him. He’s holding the drink and he can’t look at him. “I said it’s fine. It’s just a drink.”

“It’s not,” he spits. “It’s not just a drink.”

“Okay,” Phil breathes, cautious and careful like he’a trying to tread between glass shattered across the floor. “What is it, then?”

“I—” Dan can taste blood in the back of his throat. “I fucked up. I fucked up.l

“You just made a _mistake_ , Dan.”

Phil’s talking in the voice that says he thinks Dan can’t breathe without reassurance, that says he thinks he’s all Dan will ever need and that says he has no idea Dan’s thinking he doesn’t fucking want him at all.

“It’s not just a mistake. It’s not just a mistake, Phil, it’s not supposed to be like that. Fuck, it—” Dan balls his hands into fight fists. “It should be coffee and milk. Coffee and _milk_. I have to make another.”

Phil reaches for him. “No, you—”

“Get off,” Dan thrashes him away and his anger bubbles and spills like water overflowing in a glass. Like water overflowing out of the edge of a bath. “Get off me, fuck, get off me. Don't touch me, fuck you.”

And then he clings to ‘fuck you’ like it’s that he religion he never had and it’s a disgusting religion, to make somebody in love with you feel like you don’t love them back and you’re so fucking angry that you could end everything you’ve ever had without a trace of immediate regret. Dan’s so fucking angry that he isn’t wishing Phil sees right through it and tells himself it’s not his fault, tells himself they’ll be okay because it’s ‘fuck you’ and it’s no milk and it’s _shut up, shut up, shut up._

“Stop fucking saying that, stop fucking saying it. It’s not okay, does it fucking look okay? Phil. Does it fucking _look_ okay?”

Phil still has his hands around the mug and he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He mumbles, “It’s just a drink,” under his breath and probably wishes he doesn’t.

“It’s _not_ just a fucking _drink_! If I fuck that up, if I fuck something so small up—” Dan starts yelling and tugging at his hair. “If I can do that, and it’s so easy, I can’t—I can’t expect to do bigger stuff and get it right. I can’t expect to do anything and get it right. I can’t get anything right. I never do fucking _anything_ right—”

Phil keeps staring at him and Dan hates the ground he walks on. He doesn’t, but he does. God, he fucking does. It’s his fucking coffee and it was his fucking request. He did it, he caused it. Dan bites his lip so hard, blood spills up onto his gums and settles on his tongue and he sees his hands reach forward to pour the hot coffee down Phil’s chest.

It scalds him, but it doesn’t.

Because he does no such thing.

But he feels the fear under his skin when he thinks about the violent act, feels it prickle and sting when he thinks about it burning his flesh and not being able to do anything about it because what is done cannot be undone and what has happened will never not have happened. And the panic flashes across Dan’ face, settles in all the empty spaces left by the unnecessary rage and he doesn’t forget about the coffee and milk but it becomes significantly less important. His head toys with the thought of Phil with coffee down his shirt and screeching in searing pain and the more he thinks about it, the more he thinks about how much worse it could get. And it’s Phil without a shirt and Phil with boiling water from the kettle, and he slips or skids and it goes all over him and—

“Stop,” Dan runs his hands over his face. _Twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven_. “Stop, please, stop it.”

He hangs his clothes up in his closet in the same order every morning. Never out of place, never a flaw in the particular appearance. It’s perfect and it’s just right and, more importantly, exactly the way it should be and it doesn’t matter how long it takes to get to said state. It doesn’t matter he takes the same number of minutes as he gives apologises when he stands in the kitchen and realises everything that’s happening is happening because he doesn’t know how to stop it.

“I can’t talk to you,” Dan tells Phil. The night after the light switches. The night after the dead mother. The night after no sleep and very little peace. “I can’t—I can’t even look at you half the time.”

“You can’t _look_ at me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I know what you think. I know what you think of me. I know you hate me and I can’t stare that in the face.”

“Dan,” Phil takes a step away from the mugs on the counter. “Where did you get that from? I don’t hate you, I could never hate you. Stop it, look at me.”

“Phil,” he manages.

“No, look at me.”

“I can’t. This isn’t okay.”

“ _What_ isn’t okay?”

“This, me, whatever the fuck is happening. It’s—It’s not okay, Phil, _I’m_ not okay. I’m tired and cranky and my head is—” Dan runs his fingers through his matted fringe. “My head is so crazy, it’s so crazy. I can’t stop it.”

“What do you mean, you can’t stop it?” Phil echoes, quieter now. “You can’t stop it from doing, what? Are you thinking too much? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Yes, you do. You must do.”

Dan peers out of the kitchen window and there’s cars and there's traffic and there's sleet and there's snow. “I feel like I don’t know anything. I feel like I’m—Fuck, like I’m losing my mind. Like I have no fucking control, Phil. I can’t think of anything past this goddamn minute because it feels like it doesn’t exist. It feels so irrelevant and far away and like I couldn’t reach the future even if I wanted to. There’s just so much shit, and I don’t know how much more I can take.”

“Why do you feel like you’re losing your mind?” Phil says. Dan glances at him, and he’s staring.

“Because nothing is enough. And I wish nothing was enough.”

There’s a minute that goes by, maybe, and then another and another before Phil whispers, “ _What_?”

Dan has his head against the door frame and his eyes shut. “Nothing is enough. No matter what I do, no matter how much I do it, it isn’t enough. No matter how many times I check the locks or how many times I check my body in the shower for a sign of fucking cancer or how many times I call to check up on you when you’re not with me, it isn’t enough. Because I could have missed a lock. Or I could have forgotten to check under my left arm. Or you could have crashed the damn car the moment we hung up. And it feels like I’ll never be satisfied, like I could have all the reassurance in the world and it wouldn’t ease my nerves. I just want to vomit, all the time. I want to vomit and I want to scream and I want to hate because if I hate, then I stop loving and I love too fucking much. I want to be one of those people who consider ‘nothing’ enough. Who can have the bare goddamn minimum of everything and it’s perfectly okay. I don’t want to be a control freak. I don’t want to be over-bearing. I don’t want to be so sensitive that the slightest inconvenience sets me off the handle but I am, Phil. I’m all of those things and I can’t stop it.”

Phil wishes he’d never bothered. Phil wishes he’d never tried. Phil wishes he’d never flicked the lights and wishes he’d never moved in and wishes he’d never asked Dan to _please realise when something is beautiful because life is often more beautiful for those who think a little different._

But Dan is just waiting for a pattern to ring him dry.

And Phil is just waiting for the day Dan will be more in love with his words than he will with how many times he says them.

“I can’t stop it,” he repeats, and he’s crying. He’s crying like a child in the car on the way home from the hospital. “I can’t stop it, Phil. I don’t know what to do.”

_Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty._

The summer is hot and the winter is cold.

Dan’s eighteen and repeating Phil’s name. And it isn’t joyous or gorgeous or funny or cute. And nobody’s laughing like nobody’s crying and there’s probably a problem but they’d rather not confront it. Dan should tell Phil that he has to say it fifty times because the first forty-nine don’t feel right against the roof of his mouth when his tongue forms them and Phil should tell Dan that he thinks he could do with some help.

“Fuck you! Are you fucking _kidding_ me? So it’s too fucking _much_ for you now?”

Twenty-four and twenty-eight.

“Did I say that? When did I say that? When have you _ever_ been too much for me?”

“You’ve wanted to leave since the moment you fucking moved in,” Dan kicks a plastic cup on the floor and crunches it under his heel. “Why not do it on my goddamn birthday? Why not do it right now? No one’s stopping you, asshole, I made everyone go for you so just make the most of it and piss off. Do you fucking hear me? I said piss off, I don’t want you.”

“And I said, you could do with some fucking _help_ ,” Phil snaps. He’s worn down in the places he wasn’t worn down in when he was twenty-two. And maybe that’s when he should’ve said such words, when he should’ve made such suggestions but maybe it always takes hell to realise you want heaven. “You’re not okay and we both know it, like we’ve both known it for years and you need to take some fucking responsibility and sort it the hell out.”

It’s the anger and the violence again. The pair come hand-in-hand like obsessions and compulsions and Dan’s mind catapults him into the thought of Phil’s neck and the bottle opener on the coffee table. He doesn’t do it but he sees it and he feels it building up and grits his teeth through the vivid image of Phil’s bloody flesh and a dirty piece of metal. And it’s so messy and so disgusting and he doesn't realise he’s choking on the very taste of it until he tries to swallow it down and almost vomits it up with the weak liquor in his system. Phil would still give anything for Dan to feel just moderately okay and Dan would still give anything for Phil to realise he deserves more than a man walking through the sloshy mud of his own mental health but neither of them will ever get what they want and, somewhere, they know that too.

The living-room is so silent that the air feels stilted and Dan coughs and splutters on the idea of jamming a fucking bottle opener into his lover’s fucking neck. Into that same area of skin he ran his lips and held on tight when the world moved too fast and the lights were too goddamn bright and Phil’s breathing fast because he’s mad but he isn’t saying anything.

Blood hot like bathwater.

Blood red like strawberry sweets.

Scrubbing the stains from the carpet and calling an ambulance for help and there are birthday banners across the doors and vodka and beer stacked up in the cupboards and it was supposed to be a good time, this fucking day, but Dan’s so used to being disappointed by everything, even at its best, that it doesn’t surprise him at all. Because he’s come to learn that everything at its best is usually just relatively okay and the most depressing of thoughts is often the most accurate.

He sees red and blue when he rubs his fingertips into his eyelids and hears sirens from somewhere deep in the city. Phil’s bleeding from the neck and he can’t get it out of his head.

“Dan,” Phil says his name, with a sudden admirable control of his anger. He puffs it all out like he’s smoking a cigarette. Twenty-four and twenty-eight. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“I—” Dan’s voice stumbles on the first syllable and he can't finish the sentence. He can’t shut it off and he can’t stop feeling sick and he can’t stop feeling sad and nobody gets it because it feels like nobody tries to and he’s never been so fucking lonely and he’s never been so fucking terrified.

“What? What is it?”

“I-I can’t, Phil—” he whimpers, and starts shaking on the spot. His knees are perhaps the only thing weaker than his own state of mind and he’s turned away from Phil when he wanders over but he feels his arms come around the shape of his scraggly back. He feels him there and he knows he’s there and he leans into his chest, keeps his eyes screwed shut and his teeth gritted tight because he can still see him bleeding even though he’s as okay as ever. He can still see him bleeding and it’s still his fucking fault and it’s still the end of the world when the day just feels a little off and he forgets the milk in the coffee and his lover suggests he could use a little help. It’s still the end of the world when it isn’t the end of the world, and Dan would never admit to himself that he’s just waiting on the end of the world like a mother waits on her child to return home from school.

Phil holds him before the living-room window and nudges his nose to his neck. “What is it? What can’t you do?”

“I-I can’t do this,” Dan’s mourning his sanity but he should've done it moons ago. “It h-hurts and I’m scared and nobody—nobody gives a fuck, Phil—”

“Shh,” Phil hushes, and brings his fingertips down Dan's bare arms. Clean. Cold. Pale. “I give a fuck. Do you hear me? I give a fuck. I just think you could do with some help, you know? Some guidance. Some talking. Maybe some medication. It doesn’t make you crazy, it doesn’t make you a freak.”

“I _am_ a freak,” Dan chokes. He still hasn’t opened his eyes. The world is a terrible place. “I am a freak a-and I am crazy. And I am obsessive and I a-am clinically insane.”

“You’re not clinically insane,” Phil says, soft around the edges. “You’re just a little lost, love. Just a little lost. Everyone's a little lost, okay? Everyone’s a little lost and sometimes it eats you up, just like sometimes you never notice it at all. It’s eating you up now and we’re dealing with it.”

“It’s eating me u-up because I’m _letting_ it.”

“You’re fighting it. Don’t tell me you’re not fighting it, you’re fighting it so hard.”

The image of blood and violence flashes behind Dan’s eyes again and he turns to bury himself in Phil’s chest, his hands coming around the shape of his shoulders to pull him to act as a safety net. As though he could ever protect him from the world inside his head. As though he could ever protect him from the counting and the checking, from the anger and the sadness and the lack of control and the lack of self-acceptance and Dan knows Phil wishes he didn’t want Dan when the clocks strike eleven and the numbers add up to four and it’s even and it’s almost right because it isn’t five but it’s closer to five than three.

“I’m l-losing it. I’m losing it if I h-haven’t already lost it.”

“What happened then? What did you see?”

And Dan winds up pulling away from Phil before he can kiss him an even four times because he doesn’t know how to tell him he’s got a mind wishing him dead. He’s got a mind wishing a bottle opener through the flesh of his neck and he dreams about it and thinks about it and he doesn’t want to admit to it, but maybe he’s just a psychopath. Maybe he needs padded walls and tasteless medicine and electric through his fucking ears because if being adored isn’t enough, being shocked has to be. If being in love and being financially stable and being an only child raised away from his parents’ mistakes isn’t enough, there can’t be much else that is. He thinks about selfishness and thinks about attention-seeking and thinks about melodrama like he’s up on stage in front of a thousand people.

_Look at me, look at me, look at me._

“Dan, hey—Come back, hey,” Phil calls after him, down the hallway and through the haze of self-consciousness. Dan tumbles along the walls and tears at a shitty banner, stuck down will sellotape and a bit of given effort. “Dan? I just want to talk to you, come on—Forget the medication talk then, forget it, maybe you don’t—Dan, maybe you don’t need help. Come on—”

Dan rushes through into the bathroom and slams the door, turning the lock and moving away. He grips onto the ceramic edge of the sink and screws his eyes shut so tight, the vision of a tortured Phil just disintegrates into splashes of colour here and there. Just red and black phosphenes that mean nothing on their own, that he can’t align and join up as individual spots to make a picture because the picture is too fucking foggy.

“Dan, please open the door,” Phil raps his knuckles against the wood. Dan’s twenty-one and driving his fist into the bedroom wall, looking for a fucking light switch. _On, off, on, off_. “I’m sorry I shouted, let me be here for you. Dan? Please, let me in.”

_On, off, on, off._

Dan turns the tap and water gushes out of the faucet, all over his shaking fingers. He puts his hands to his eyes and droplets roll down his face, temporarily relieving the painful cracks in his lips and the tears on his cheeks.

“You deserve more than this,” Phil says. His voice is right against the door and Dan would love him if he didn’t want him dead. But he doesn’t want him dead, he doesn’t. He doesn’t know why he keeps fucking seeing what he does. “We deserve more than this. We never asked for this, we never fucked up enough to get this. This isn’t your fault, Dan, this isn’t either of our faults. Let me in, love, please.”

Dan turns the faucet off and thinks about a dead Phil. Thinks about murder and thinks about suicide and thinks about blood mixed with disgusting mud, dirty and sloshy in the palms of a man swearing he didn’t mean to do it.

He turns the faucet back on and counts to three under his breath.

“Dan, please.”

He turns it off and does the same.

_On, off, on, off._

“Dan, I—I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I can’t help you if you don’t let me in.”

The water stops and starts like somebody’s using it to feel as though they have any amount of control and Dan craves said control and order much like a corrupt world leader. Much like a patient of a bleach-white hospital, spitting ‘you’ and ‘don’t’ and ‘understand’ in a particular pattern to try and gain some compassion. Like a simple declaration of, “I get it, I understand,” is enough to make the world turn on its axis, is enough to shovel into Dan the energy to get under the shower head and make himself a sandwich. Sometimes it’s impossible, he thinks, as he stands there messing with the bathroom faucet, to be convinced of anything but the impeccable accuracy of his self-deprecating ideologies.

It’s impossible to realise he’s worth no less than anybody else.

“I’d do anything to make this go away, Dan.”

Phil’s crying and Dan’s trying to erase the link between the faucet and his lover’s fate. He could be told a thousand times that turning the water on and off won’t protect Phil from dying any earlier than he’s supposed to, but he’d still grip the metal and pull on it. He’d still pull on it because he’s apologetic and frightened of his own fucking capabilities.

_Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three._

He was always apologising for the things he had no control over.

At twenty-five, he starts drinking. Phil doesn’t stop him because he doesn’t know how and, even if he did, he wouldn’t try. It isn’t his battle to fight, he tells his mother one day. It isn’t his place to dictate and accuse.

“I don’t understand you, Phil,” she says, the woman that raised him. They’re in a café drinking coffee but Phil’s struggling to reach for his own, for the smell of it and the taste of it just make him think of Dan’s breath in the morning. He’d rather reek of coffee than he would of alcohol. “You love him, I understand that. He’s everything to you. But don’t you . . . don’t you think you deserve more?”

Phil stares into his mug. “More than, what? Than him? I can’t do better than him.”

“Not him,” His mother says. “Whatever’s wrong with him. What _is_ wrong with him?”

Phil shakes his head and takes a breath and he wonders whether everything feels just right in the world for Dan in that moment or not. “Depression, probably. Dad was depressed, I remember bits of it. What—What did he do? What was he like?”

“Your father?”

“Yeah. When he was sick, what was he like?”

“Numb,” The woman tells her son. She doesn’t think it’s the right time to admit to him the man he’s in love with will probably never be able to love him back in the way he wants him too. “Empty, at times. Others, angry and others, just sad.”

“Dan gets angry. Dan gets sad too and probably empty, but—Well, he doesn’t talk to me. I don’t know how he feels inside. It’s driving me mad not knowing what’s going on with him.”

“He’s been like it for years now, Phil.”

“And what am I supposed to do, Mom?” Phil leans forward, with a sudden sharp angle to his voice. “What am I supposed to do about it? I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with him, it’s—it’s insane. _He’s_ insane, I swear to God. He just sits around and cries and drinks and laughs at shitty comedies and doesn’t clean up after himself but—but everything has to be in order. Everything has to be ‘perfect’ as if perfect fucking exists. All aligned, all symmetrical. Clothes hung in the same place, the fronts of both shoes touching the wall, the canned food stored in alphabetical order.”

“He sounds obsessive,” Phil’s mother says. It’s the first time Phil confronts it with an external force.

“He is obsessive.”

“Your father wasn’t like that. Your father was just depressed.”

Phil feels his phone go in his pocket and doesn’t move to touch it. He knows it’s Dan. It’s the third time he’s called. “What, and Dan isn’t?”

“Maybe. But there’s also probably more to it, Phil. You should take him to a doctor before it gets too bad for either of you to handle.”

“It’s already too bad. We already can’t handle it. If he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, how can I be expected to know?” Phil rubs his hands over his face and squeezes the bridge of his nose as he admits, “I can’t keep up with him. He’s all over the place, Mom.”

_Thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six._

Dan’s sick to fucking death of being sick to fucking death. Bottles and liquor and recurring fucking thoughts. He tries to drink them away but they always come back when he stumbles into consciousness with no alcohol to support him and no friends to offer him a hand. And for a while he’a mad, like he always fucking is, that he has nobody there. But then he manages to realise, eventually, that people don’t fucking help. And talking doesn’t fucking work. And he probably needs a fucking hospital but he doesn’t have the fucking willpower to get from the couch to the front door.

Phil doesn’t call it alcoholism like Dan doesn’t call it depression. And neither of them call it what it really is, drawing their finger across those three letters in the alphabet because they can’t quite manage to bring themselves to face it. Dan is twenty-five and Phil is twenty-nine and he keeps tapping his fingers around the bottle in his hands like he’s counting down the days until he drinks himself into a coffin but he’s just trying to minimise the possible threat of Phil not getting home safe.

He’s just trying to make everything feel okay.

And Phil tells him, “You’re drunk again. You’re _always_ fucking drunk again.”

And Dan thinks about driving his fist into the left side of Phil’s face just for stating the fucking obvious and getting in his fucking way. And he begins again to articulate the world’s interpretation of unstable as he pushes Phil away and slurs, “Fuck you.”

_On, off, on, off._

“Fuck you,” he spits it again. He can’t stop now he’s started. Wheels spinning under vehicles on snow-heavy streets. “Fuck you, fuck you. Fuck you.”

“Stop it, Dan,” Phil snaps at him. “Stop it, fuck. You’re driving me insane.”

“Fuck you,” Dan slurs again, harder and angrier. He stumbles in the hallway and Phil grips his arm.

Everything at its best is just relatively okay.

_Get out, get out, get out._

“It isn’t your job to be his psychiatrist, Phil,” Phil’s mother says to him. “I know how deeply you care for him, but sometimes it doesn’t matter how much we love someone. Sometimes it makes no difference at all. He needs professional help and your only responsibility is to convince him of that.”

“I can’t. I’ve tried and I can’t.”

His mother tears her nails down a small packet of sugar and pours the granules into her drink. “Then maybe you should walk away.”

_Numb._

“Why the fuck are you drinking so much?” Phil keeps a tight grip on Dan’s small arm. It’s the same size and he’s the same weight as he was when he was eighteen, and he was a baby who didn’t know anything more than how to pronounce his own name. How to check and repeat. Check and repeat. “Dan, why the fuck are you drinking so much?”

“Fuck you, I’m not,” The insides of ‘nothing’ for nothing is all he has to offer. “Fuck you, I'm not.”

They’re twenty-five and twenty-nine and Dan can’t stop drinking. Dan can’t stop drinking and can’t stop saying ‘fuck you’ and can’t drumming his fingers around the filthy fucking bottle. If ever he knew how to put words to thoughts in a way that didn’t equate to a medical diagnosis, he’d say that he can’t stop because he can’t feel anything. And he’s so desperate to feel something that he just keeps taking and taking, swallowing and consuming and stealing and praying for all he has to one day feel enough. He drinks because he’s disgusting and he drinks because he’s evil and he drinks because he’s numb and he drinks because he’s flat.

An empty head and a blank canvas.

_Paint me a summer to get through the rain._

“Did something happen with your parents?” The warm sunlight floods Phil Lester’s tiny childhood bedroom. _Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine_. “You can tell me, you know? You can tell me anything.”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Dan sniffs. He’s eighteen and crying, tissue damp and falling to pieces in his hands. “It’s silly, I’m just being silly.”

“I bet you’re not.”

“I am,” he weakly argues, as Phil smooths his hand over his lower back. “It’s really dumb. My parents, they just—I feel like they don’t get it.”

Phil watches him with sincerity. “What don’t they get?”

It’s easier at eighteen. Not easy, but easier. He’s still a little bit too much at that age, still a little over-bearing but nobody really notices. The laces on one shoe can't be pulled tighter than the laces on the other, and that’s kind-of just it.

“How stressed I am and stuff. How hard it is,” Dan mumbles, because he has no idea what he’ll come to bound into. He has no idea that he’ll wind up knee-deep in _I can’t do this anymore_ even before a decade has gone by, and that complaining about what he has right now is nothing short of insulting. “School is too much to handle, like, it makes me feel like I’m choking. It’s suffocating. And my parents, they want me to study law and go to college and I just—I just can’t. All they ever fucking do is scream at me about it. Everything I do is wrong.”

“It’s not,” Phil defends. “You’re trying your best.”

“My best has never been good enough for them. My mom always wants more than I can physically and emotionally give and my dad wants me to be just like him,” Dan rolls his sleeve down into his palm, bunching it up and trying to dry his eyes. “It’s pathetic. I feel like I can’t breathe. If I make the smallest goddamn mistake, it’s the end of the world. Forgetting to hang my coat up, forgetting to put milk in a cup of coffee. At least I went to the effort of _making_ the coffee, Christ. I just—I hate it, Phil.”

Phil rubs his arm and keeps him close to console him. “I know, love. It’s not pathetic, you’re not being dumb, you probably—Well, I mean you sound like you’re constantly having to keep your guard up. Your eyes open. Just in case something happens, you know? Just in case you make a mistake because it’s never just a mistake to them. That can’t be easy.”

It’s not easy, but it’s easier. It’s not easy because it begins there but it’s easier because it doesn’t end there. Dan doesn’t want it to end there, doesn’t want to leave Phil there and doesn’t _really_ hate his parents there because he doesn’t _really_ have anything to blame them for.

_Angry._

“You just make it worse when you drink!” Phil’s twenty-nine and screaming. “Do you fucking realise that? You just make it worse and you—Fuck, you blame _me_! Like this is _my_ fault! Like I’ve ever done anything but support you and be here for you and hold you when you’ve cried and switch the goddamn lights on and off! On and off and on and—”

Dan’s dropped the bottle on the floor and is tearing at his hair. Nobody gets it because nobody tries to. There could be cancer in his body and the world is a terrible place. “Stop it, stop it—Phil, stop it—”

Check and repeat.

“And I’ve loved you and I’ve tried to help you and I’ve spent nights trying to get you out of the fucking shower and—”

Check and repeat.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” And then Dan’s just stuck on it. And then he sees Phil packing his shit and getting into a fatal accident and he’s just fucking stuck on it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—Don’t leave, I’m sorry—”

_Sad._

Dan etches the word into his fucking skin one night, drawing patterns down his arm with the tip of his index tracing the goosebumps. He paints it into the condensation on foggy glass and breathes it into the cold air of early December when he leaves the house to get milk and counts the cracks in the sidewalk. It’s not empty, most days, and it’s not angry and it’s not nothing even though sometimes it is.

Usually, it’s sad. Just a bubble of emotion that he prods and pokes but that doesn’t ever burst and maybe that’s for the best. He’s twenty-six and so drunk that he can’t speak when he searches symptoms for the first time and, to begin with, it’s just depression but then it's so much more. And it’s a string of different anxieties, a handful of them playing on the word ‘disorder’ and making it plural like Dan’s never been _this_ kind-of guy and _that_ kind-of guy. He’s only ever been _this_ type of anxious and _that_ type of depressed. Only ever fit this category because that category isn’t bad enough. And they say it doesn’t feel like sadness but he swears to God they don’t know what they’re talking about when he sits there with alcohol hot and sticky on his chin and sobs into the flatlined silence. When he cries so hard, his throat burns and it feels like somebody’s driven a knife down there in an attempt to cut through the arteries taking his blood to his heart. And it doesn’t feel like nothing, it doesn’t feel like an anger so intense that he can barely contain it.

It just feels like sadness.

And like things could have been different.

And like Phil Lester should walk away.

And like everything at its best is just relatively okay.

Because Dan’s twenty-six and trying to drink himself to death. And Dan’s twenty-six the first time he leaves the door to the bathroom unlocked and Phil finds him there alone, shaking in the bathtub under the cold stream of water.

He’s tiny and he’s frightened.

Exhausted and sad.

Phil loves him more than sleep itself.

“You’ve been in here for two hours,” he says, so tender that he refuses to even breathe through it. He’s got purple circles under his eyes because the lock on the bedroom door is distracting. Because having to love a disease is distracting. Because grief is distracting. “Are you okay?”

Dan’s teeth chatter and his knees tremble in the shallow water. He’s counting the tiles on the walls under his breath.

“I could never leave him,” Phil argues his mother’s point in the little café. At twenty-nine, she looks at him like she went wrong somewhere. “I could never. You didn’t leave dad. This isn’t about what I want.”

“It’s about what both of you want, Phil. That’s what a relationship is.”

“That’s what a _stable_ relationship is. We’ve never had that and we never will. I don’t—Hell, I don’t want that. You can’t know calm if you don’t know chaos, Mom. You can’t know good if you don’t know bad.”

“It’s never good with you two. It hasn’t been for years,” The woman is calmer now, and Phil remembers her standing there at his father’s funeral. Black makeup on her cheeks. Black makeup on her pillows. “Don’t lie to yourself, honey. I’m not asking you to end it with him, I’m just—”

“Yes, you are,” Phil's fingers come and grip the edge of the table. It’s sticky with previously spilled coffee but his knuckles bleach a sickly-white at the strength in which he holds on. “That’s exactly what you’re asking me to do. And it isn’t fucking fair, Mom, I’m twenty-nine. I’m twenty-nine and I love him and I’m my own goddamn person.”

“You know I only want what’s best for you, Phil, and I just don’t think Dan—“

“He is. He fucking is, okay? He is. I can handle him. I can’t leave him. I love him. How can you even ask me to walk away?” Phil’s irritation is matched with a strong fear of loss. Of mourning what he couldn’t bear to ever mourn and he runs his hands over his hair and manages, “I love him,” like it’s all he’s ever known.

_Forty, forty-one, forty-two._

Phil’s knelt at the side of the bath with his eyes on a twenty-six year-old Dan. And neither of them ever knew summer when they were met with the rain, like neither of them ever knew light when they were met with the dark. It’s just a continual sequence of _on, off, on, off_ and they can’t still their fingers, can’t retract their hands, can’t beg for forgiveness if there’s nobody willing to listen.

“Do you need help getting out?” Phil lifts his hand and brushes his knuckles against Dan’s cold cheek. “Baby, you’re freezing. You’re freezing. Do you want to get out?”

Dan’s blood is still poisoned with last night’s vodka. He’s counting the tiles and hoping there’s fifty and he’s thinking too much at the front of his mind. He needs to push some thoughts to the left and the right and the back.

He whimpers under a surge of sadness, and Phil hushes it away. He hooks loose arms around his freezing body and whispers, “It’s alright, you’re alright. Don’t cry, love, please. Everything’s alright. Let me warm the water for you.”

And there’s melancholy between them.

Melancholy that gushes out of the faucet when Phil switches on the hot water to heat up Dan’s skin and melancholy that laps over his lidded eyes when Phil brings some to his face to cleanse him of the fresh tears. He doesn’t wish to leave in that moment, and nothing is truly okay but he doesn’t wish to leave and that means more than it should be allowed to. He puts his lips to Dan’s damp forehead and kisses him like he’s trying to say something he’ll never know the words to say and Dan holds onto his shirt, letting grimy bathwater soak the fabric.

“I’m sorry,” Dan sobs and lays his head against Phil’s neck. He’s fighting it. Check and repeat. He’s fighting it. “I’m—I love you. I’m sorry. G-God, I am. I am. I love you.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Phil tries to thread his fingers through the mat at the back of Dan’s hair. He kisses his face and thinks about symptoms. Thinks about suicide and thinks about sadness. “You didn’t ask for this. Nobody asks for this. I’m not mad at you.”

“I-I just want—” Dan chokes over the words. “I just want s-some control.”

“You have control,” Phil whispers. “Dan, you have plenty of control. I promise you. Plenty of it. You’re gonna get better.”

Dan clings on tighter. He doesn’t know why. “I love too much,” he cries, like it's the first time ever. “I l-love too much. I don’t want this. I don’t want to wake up.”

_I’d do anything to make this go away._

And Phil Lester doesn’t get it, he comes to understand. He’s never really got it and he never really will. And sometimes what happens has to happen regardless of whether or not we’ve asked it to, and whether or not we want it to, and sometimes it isn't enough to be willing to give your life for someone because that someone doesn’t want your life. That someone, for the most part, just wants their own. They don’t wish for a sacrifice when the clocks strike eleven-eleven (one and one and one and one) and they don’t wish for someone to hold them in a freezing bathroom when they can’t sit upright on their own. The reality of the situation is that Dan wishes for no such thing when the clocks strike said time because Dan’s too busy counting the numbers to consider what the numbers mean. Like Dan’s too busy juggling the weight of gold on an engagement ring to consider what the engagement ring means. And Phil tries with crossed fingers only to keep both of their heads above the water because doing anything else is far too much work and he doesn’t wish for Dan to say thank you because he doesn’t wish for gratitude given fifty times over.

He doesn’t wish for the excuse that the first forty-nine times just didn’t feel right.

For maybe the last nine hundred days just didn’t feel right. And maybe the last nine thousand kisses just didn’t feel right.

He doesn’t know whether Dan gets it this time either when he says, “There’s no such thing as loving too much. You either love too much, or you don’t love at all,” but he hopes he does.

He hopes it makes him feel okay.

And a little less sick.

And a little less sad.

And a little less like everything he’s ever known has just been a matter of chronological order.

“But are you sure, Dad? Are you _sure_ he’s dead?” Phil’s stood in small dungarees in the hot summer garden and his father is scooping a deceased pigeon up into a plastic bag.

“Most certainly, little guy,” His father attempts to reassure him. “But it’s alright. He’ll be alright now. I’ll bury him near the trees up the top of the lawn, how’s that sound?”

“Okay,” Phil says, and swallows back his emotion. Swallows back the naive _it’s not fair_ in fear of the customary _well, life isn’t_. “I wish he didn’t die, Dad.”

“Me too, son. But these things happen, they do. They happen to everyone. To this pigeon and to you and to your mother and to me. Everyone. No exception.”

“But it’s sad, Dad. He’s dead and—” Phil’s ten and he sniffs. “He’s dead and it’s sad.”

_Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five._

“I just want to be happy,” Dan’s ribs appear so feeble in the shape of his chest that Phil fears they’re going to collapse into his stomach. He shuts the hot water off and keeps his arm tight around Dan and he doesn’t know what to say so he doesn't even try. “I-It’s-too much now, Phil. It’s too much and I don’t w-want it now. I want to sleep. I want t-to go to sleep. No more numbers. No m-more time. No more you and n-no more me. No more us.”

“No more us,” Phil echoes, quiet. “There’ll always be us. It’ll always be us. You know that, don’t you? I’ll never leave you alone.”

Dan shakes his head and he can’t speak. He’s crying so hard that he can’t fucking speak.

Everything at its best is just relatively okay.

Maybe Phil does get that, in his own way. Maybe everyone does, in their own way. But maybe it just sounds different each time a person says it, and maybe it’s ignorance for one whilst it’s reality for another. Maybe Phil finds it in the state of an empty side of the bed when Dan turns twenty-seven and he turns thirty-one. Maybe he finds it in an ordered closet, finds it in a static screen. Maybe he finds it in Dan’s mouth and finds it in Dan’s voice like Dan finds it in the number fifty and finds it in, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can get up today.”

_Forty-six._

He jumps the cracks in the sidewalk at ten.

And Phil’s father tells him there’s no such thing as loving too much.

“Don’t leave him then,” His mother says, in the café when he’s responsible and there’s no dead fucking pigeon. “Don’t leave him but he’s going to ruin you, Phil. He’s ruined himself and he’s ruining you.”

“I love him, what is so fucking hard for you to understand about that?”

“What is so fucking hard for you to understand about the fact being in love with someone isn’t the same as being responsible for saving their life, Phil?”

_Forty-seven._

Phil plays with the light switch, not knowing if he’s helping or making it worse.

And Dan wishes for murder and wishes for suicide and wishes for hate and wishes for control and he apologises for the things he has no control over.

At twenty-seven, he doesn’t share a bed with Phil anymore. Instead, the hospital is a kind-of safety net that a lover could never be. He tells the doctors that he doesn’t know how to win and they tell him he doesn’t have to because it isn’t about winning.

And he tells them he wishes he still knew what it was about.

He used to say he didn’t like to breathe when the lights went out but now, if asked, he’d say he doesn’t like to breathe at all. On the bad days, he wonders whether Phil has checked the locks or whether Phil has checked his body or whether Phil has woken up at all. He wonders whether he died in his sleep or whether he drank too much or whether, for the first time, he’d rather die than put a fight. And on the good days, he wonders whether he’ll tell him he loves him fifty times when he visits that afternoon because he knows now that the first forty-nine never really feel right.

He knows now that it was never a personal thing.

_Forty-eight._

When Dan accidentally cut the right side of his face with a razor in the shower, he had to cut the left side too. And when he dropped a bottle of liquor and smashed it on the floor, he had to smash another too. And then another and then another. And maybe some more also, but that doesn’t really matter. It only matters that nothing does anymore and Dan’s in a hospital for those a little less sick and a little more sick than he is and sometimes he feels crazy, but others he just feels like it’s everyone else. Others, he just feels like he’s the only one that understands and the rest of the world is so out of it, they can’t see what’s staring right at them.

And the doctors let him believe that everyone in Australia has emigrated to America.

And that one day the pattern will ring him dry.

And that one day he’ll realise when something is beautiful.

_Forty-nine._

Dan jumps the cracks in the sidewalk at ten.

And Phil’s father tells him there’s no such thing as loving too much.

_Fifty._


End file.
